17/05/13
Duke of Edinburgh’s Award with SLD pupils
This week I had the pleasure of sending off NINE completed Bronze Award books for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. For any teenager this is an achievement, for mine who all have an identified SLD this is amazing. It’s also the first time that pupils from my school have completed the award.
We have done the Award during timetabled Enrichment time - pupils all come on school transport so after school just wasn’t going to happen.
My gang – four girls (autism, Downs, profoundly deaf, epileptic and never spent a night away from home) and five boys (autism, Downs, SLD in combination) and two teaching assistants, one of whom had also never camped before!
Skills
We learnt to play the handchimes. Pupils were not content to just play the notes when I pointed at them, they decided that they wanted to be conducting. We stuck to simple music (Twinkle Twinkle, London’s Burning, Happy Birthday) and printed out lots of individual photos. The sheet music was blown up to A3 size and a member of staff then put the photo of the right pupil under the note of the handchime that they were holding. The conductor was able to use this to tell the appropriate pupil how many notes they had to play. OK, so it took 5 minutes to play a tune, but THEY were doing it on their own.
Physical
We learnt to play ‘New Age Kurling’ and had great fun while we were at it. This included taking part in two competitions, and of course we came away with a medal! Pupils were able to set the space up to play, organise themselves into teams, take turns and encourage others to do better.
Volunteering
We went to our local Country Park which has a good record of working with pupils like ours and did some countryside management work. We were lucky enough to be able to leave before lunch and eat lunch while we were there so that we got more time to work. Things we did included weeding, finding and counting the swans, collecting litter and trimming back the extra growth on a large number of ornamental trees.
Expedition
I applied for a variation for this part, as some of the pupils were never going to be able to meet all of the requirements. I split the group, the more able walked and the others went to places of interest in the local area. Pupils helped put up tents; set up, light and cook on Trangias and collect wood for the evening campfire. Those that were walking were able to use a book of photos taken previously along the route to find the way that they were supposed to be going. They slept independently in their tents and managed sleeping bags well (we practised this skill a lot!). On returning to school pupils recalled what they had done, chose photos and dictated captions for their presentation, which they then shared with the Head Teacher.
Filed under School
100WCGU #88 – eighteen year old promises
This week, the 100 word challenge was …parting is such sweet sorrow…
Thinking about the time of year, y11 and Y13 students going off into the world it seemed appropriate
***
and parting is such sweet sorrow
how could we stay after all that had gone before
and how could we go knowing all that was still to happen.
but part we must
the sorry moment was helping no one.
too many tears, too many fond goodbyes
knowing, deep down, that we were making promises
which could only be broken.
‘keep in touch’, ‘see you soon’
‘best friends for always’, ‘be there for you’.
once we’d gone our separate ways
all that remained was a year book, a shirt with messages on
a phone number.
and at Christmas we’d pass on the street like near strangers
Filed under Other than school
STEM session 5 – naming parts of a plane
We had out last school based visit from our STEM ambassador today.
Building on all the work that we’ve been doing on flight, including how wings work, forces and the distances involved in travelling at great speed as well as making and flying paper aircraft, today we put together our own (plastic) planes and had to name the various parts.
Ken had prepared labels and is finally getting to grips with the low level of ability of our pupils. They tried hard with reading some very challenging words, and with the use of the models we were all able to name some parts of the plane and ‘fly’ it, showing what technical terms such as pitch, yaw and banking actually look like.
He’s now set us two challenges. The first is to complete a wall display about everything that we’ve learned over the year. We’ve started one and just need to add to it for this final session. The other is for me to work out which of the bits we’ve learned we are going to recap on when we go to the Air Museum down the road from school at the end of term.
It’s amazing how quickly an hour long session goes when you’re all engaged in what is happening!
